And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini: The Novel Cure for thinking you can get away with it

Hosseini's third novel is challenging and thought-provoking

Challenging and thought-provoking: Khaled Hosseini (Getty)

Ailment: Thinking you can get away with it

Cure: And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Acts of selfishness are commonly made in the hope that they'll go unobserved. While not necessarily performed with malice, they may be motivated by self-preservation, or the hope of the greater good – wounding one person to save another.

But there is almost always a payback, even if it takes years – as happens in And the Mountains Echoed, the challenging, thought-provoking third novel by Khaled Hosseini. Read it and you'll find yourself thinking twice before trying to get away with something you know in your heart of hearts you shouldn't do.

In the mountains of Afghanistan, a deeply bonded brother and sister are separated when still very young – a theme first explored by Hosseini in The Kite Runner. Their father tells himself he's doing it for good reasons – but it turns out to be the first of several underhand deeds in this dark, haunting novel. As the action moves from the mountains to the city of Kabul – and from there to France, Greece and America – we meet the siblings' aunt, Parwana, who pushes her more beautiful sister Masooma out of a tree, realising that in Masooma's shadow she will never get the husband she wants.

Masooma, permanently crippled by the fall, thereafter needs Parwana's daily care – until, that is, Masooma asks to be left to die in the desert, a suicide that can only be achieved with Parwarna's full complicity. Then there is Idris, who forms a bond with Rhosi, a girl desperately in need of surgery for the horrific axe wound to her head sustained when the rest of her family were massacred. Idris promises to help her, but when he goes back to his new, expensive life in America, he is gradually distracted by his own concerns, and forgets.

We become acutely aware of how one moment of selfishness can reverberate over a lifetime. When, years later, Idris meets Rhosi again, he pays bitterly for his inaction. Parwana's payback comes in more subtle ways, which are nevertheless shattering. What may make life easier in the short term may haunt you in the long.

​thenovelcure.com